Family photo from RM Vaughan.
The following is the last instalment in a five-part, first-person series about what to expect when a parent is dying.
Here's the truth about funerals: If you have little or no real relationship with organized religion, but your parent, born of another era, did, you will find yourself at the centre of a series of rituals and practices that, at best, are harmlessly antique or, at worst, downright offensive. Religious rites are by nature exclusionary, easy to forgive and best forgotten, but funerals are deceptive: You're seated in the front row, but you're practically invisible.
It's not the fault of the institution you are dealing with – it's only trying to do its best within its sphere – but the result of the profound disconnect between organized religion and contemporary life. A funeral, even one held in the most progressive and culturally savvy religious institution, bears little resemblance to the complexities of death and grieving today. I guarantee you that you will spend more time agonizing over what, if anything, to post on social media regarding your parent's death than you will over the particulars of the archaic ritual that is a funeral.
After my mother died, my brother and I dutifully attended to the arrangements at her local funeral home. We were shown a wide variety of interment … what is the polite term? … ornamentation. Caskets with frosted pink lining, caskets with brass knobs, caskets with matte or shiny surfaces, "show" caskets versus burial caskets.
When we revealed that my mother had chosen to be cremated, we were handed a catalogue of urns. There is no way to be nice about the majority of urns on the market – ugly is ugly. Be prepared. And, yes, it is okay to burst into guffaws when you feast your eyes on the urn that looks like a golf bag, the urn that looks like a fishing tackle box or the motorbike urn. I may have been partly delirious at the time, but I'm pretty sure I saw an urn shaped like a coral reef topped with shiny, sporty dolphins.
We chose a cloisonné urn with brassy gold highlights. It looked like something Mum would find pretty. The funeral parlour attendant walked away to get some more forms. I looked at my brother and said: "You realize we're putting that $800 jar into the ground, don't you?" That was the first absurdity.
In the days leading up to my mother's funeral, her minister, a nice woman, came looking for me. I had promised my mother I would perform her eulogy, but I had been lying. I have no problem with public speaking, but writing and reading my writing out loud are what I do for a living – I wanted my mother's funeral to be something I could experience quietly, not to become some awful adjunct to my career, another 10 minutes on stage with a piece of paper in front of my face.
But the minister was determined, so I relented and gave her a brief narrative about my mother, something simple she (the minister) could relate to the assembled: My father had died about a decade before my mother, and he was difficult right up until the end. After his death, my mother had the first free time of her adult life and she used it well. The minister agreed that this story of a woman spending her final years taking care of herself first, for once, was a great narrative arch. That settles that, I thought.
The funeral was full of all kinds of Christian chat but, since I am not a Christian, the minister might as well have been reading a crossword puzzle aloud. Unless you are a devout religious person, be ready for your parent's funeral to mean absolutely nothing to you, on a spiritual level. But the funeral is not for you, even if everybody says it is.
The funeral is for your parent's peers, people much older than you who probably have very different belief systems. But that's what funerals do, they invert the natural order – an event that ought to be a comfort and a gesture of support focused on you and your siblings, or you and your partner, your family, is actually about everybody else in the room.
You can't be too upset, because your parent's relationship to her or his friends might well be a much longer and more storied one than your own. A funeral is a very private and terrible exercise that rips your guts out … performed in front of a room full of people you have either never met or not seen in years. A funeral is inherently cruel and oddly lovely at the same time.
After giving my mother's minister what I thought was a great story angle, the funeral was chugging along when suddenly another nice lady got up on stage and read a Christian tract about "good women," and how said women endured all the nonsense their husbands and brats (I felt pretty sure I was the subject there) put them through because that is the role of women in the world, to tolerate. Where did my liberation metaphor go? My mother was no radical feminist, but she was also something much greater than a brainless beast of burden.
I could barely look at the minister after the funeral. I was furious with her and what I perceived to be a Christian conspiracy to bury my mother on its terms, to wrap her in its wretched patriarchal winding cloths.
Realizing I was losing control, I called a pal. He's a gay man of a certain age who's attended far too many funerals. He gave me the best and last lesson of the whole process of watching my mother die and be buried: Remember, you are, for now, just the decoration. Nobody even notices you there. If your shoes are shined and your suit is pressed, you've done your bit. Your time comes later.
For those of you about to lose a parent, I give the same advice: Your time comes later. All you need to do at the funeral is be present and presentable, almost invisible. Because you're the one who gets to live on.